The structure of social collaboration on Wikipedia
The structure of social collaboration on Wikipedia | ||
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| Presenters | Sorin Adam Matei (Purdue University), David Braun (Purdue University), Horia Petrache (IUPUI) | |
| Themes | Academic, Communities | |
| About the presenters | ||
| Sorin Adam Matei is an associate Professor of Communication at the Purdue University David Braun is the Director of the Envision Center at Purdue University. Horia Petrache is an Assistant professor at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). | ||
| Abstract | ||
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The massive amounts of data reflecting social and communicative behavior produced by social media, such as Wikipedia, creates an huge opportunity for exploring some key social scientific related to structures and interaction patterns online. Wikipedia’s ability and willingness to share data about user behavior collected over long periods of time provides a golden opportunity for tracking spontaneous emergence of division of labor, group hierarchies, or collaborative norms. Our project uses TeraGrid resources to measure the emergence of social order online by measuring and tracking over time the distribution of collaborative effort across contributors. It is at the same time an example of computation social science, illustrating how massive amounts of data can be mined using analytic techniques that produce global indicators of social interaction and social order. Utilizing social information theory, we are in the process of describing, with the ultimate goal of explaining, the manner in which Wikipedia collaborators have created their own division of labor and hierarchy and by implication social order on Wikipedia. | ||
| Language | English | |
| Video (download) | ||